Sansan launches the ‘Eight’ app in India

Sansan has today launched the ‘Eight’ app in India. In Japan, Eight already has 2 million users, 5000 daily downloads and it also digitizes around 300,000 business cards every day. In India, connections are currency and upward mobility is highly driven by “who you know”, so Eight has brought a sophisticated and scalable business card digitization process that connects people in innovative ways. It intends to fix the management of business contacts without a lot of clutter and dissonance in the market.

In order to escalate the speed of digitizing business cards, Sansan will launch a business card scan partner program in India. Sansan provides its unique business card scanner to co-working spaces, chain shops such as coffee or tea chains where business persons come by, and facilities where more than 100 people visit per day. An Eight user can bring their large pile of exchanged business cards and save time to digitize them, which allows them to fully unleash the power of personal business connections. Sansan is also looking for business process outsourcing companies to create a joint operation to scan cards for Eight users.

Speaking at the launch event, Chika Terada, CEO, Sansan said, “For Asian professionals, the business card is a vital tool for networking and progression. More than 10 billion business cards are exchanged a year, and with Eight, we plan to not only streamline this process, but also add more value to it so that every connection counts for an individual. India represents a huge market for us due to its large English-speaking working population. We are focusing on India to help us reach our ultimate goal of creating the future of “no paper” business cards.”

The Eight app and the power of connection

The Eight app combines business card scanning features with social media functionality to connect users and enable them to capitalize on a superior networking platform. The app has implemented AI driven technologies and offers a new way to unleash the potential of business connections by converting analog business card information to digital. It ensures that business connections in India are available at everyone’s fingertips. With the Eight app, users can:

Use their smartphone camera to digitize business cards

Manage their contacts by digitizing business cards

Connect with contacts over the app itself

View insights through a real-time news feed

Utilize complete integration with their phone for email/phone conversations

Get recommendations of new connections

Edward Senju, Executive Producer of Eight added,“Since our establishment, we have continuously enhanced our transcription process to reach 99.8% accuracy, and to transcribe more than 200 million business cards a year in a secure way. By doing so, we have stored an enormous amount of data of business persons connections. Utilizing these data with AI technologies will help us provide new opportunities for our users.”